


A Light for the Night

by the_seaworthy_muffin



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Immortal Merlin, Reincarnation, Stormy nights and Miracles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:01:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29890476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_seaworthy_muffin/pseuds/the_seaworthy_muffin
Summary: Never turn a stranger away, people say. Because you never know who it may be in disguise.A storm rages outside. Will’s daughter is dying. And their little household gets a visitor- one with black hair and blue eyes which have seen too much, and who seems to know Will eerily well.Or: Merlin, during his wanderings, decides to pay an old friend a visit. He ends up helping a lot more than he’d imagined. A Merlin-Will reincarnation friendship fic, with a large dollop of Immortal!Merlin.
Relationships: Merlin & Will (Merlin)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32





	A Light for the Night

**Author's Note:**

> I'm actually not certain I'm 100% happy with this, but I've been agonizing over this way too long, and being the sort of person who can't move on when they have a WIP resting in their folder I decided to hurry up and finish it! You know when you have this super-detailed picture in your head and then it evaporates as soon as you begin typing it out? Yeah, that's sort of what happened with this... *shifty eyes*  
> Written because I've always wanted to delve a little bit more into Merlin and Will's friendship in the series, and also because I'm a sucker for immortal!Merlin meeting people from his past life. Recommended soundtrack: Michael Nyman's the Departure, and Loreena Mckennitt's Dante's Prayer. (Though I seem to be recommending that song for most of my fics/art nowadays? xD)

**Ealdor, One Sunny Afternoon.**

“You know,” Will says offhandedly as they stretch themselves on the grassy banks of the small stream near Ealdor. “I heard that turtles live forever.”

“What?” Merlin scrambles up, propping himself up on his elbows to stare at Will incredulously. “Where do you hear these ridiculous things? And, who wants to live forever, anyway? It would be horribly sad to watch everyone die. Never-mind terribly boring.”

“I _know_ that, you dolt.” Will flops himself onto his back. “But- It’s, just. I wonder how it feels like.”

Merlin snorts. “You’ve been listening to Old Man Simmons again, haven’t you? We don’t even know if turtles _do_ live forever.” He points to a turtle that’s waddling up the bank towards them. “See, if what you said is true, that little thing might be nine hundred years old.” Merlin scrunches up his nose. “A real grandfather turtle.”

“I haven’t been talking to him- goddess’ sake, Merlin, he chased us with _brooms!_ ” Will’s face flushes bright red. “But, I mean, haven’t you ever imagined?”

“Well.” Merlin pauses. “Can’t say I have. But, well, if I were immortal…”

“What makes you think you’d be the older one?” Will snipes.

“Oi, of course I’d be. You know I have my,” Merlin glances around furtively. “ _Magic_. And everyone knows I’m the more sensible one. So, well, obviously, in the future, you’d have been a massive idiot. And I’d have to drop by to make you see sense.”

“What makes you think I’d still be alive then?”

“Maybe it’d be your grandson or something. The funny thing about family, yeah? They say idiocy is something that’s passed down over the ages…”

“I _heard_ that!”

Merlin is halfway across the meadow by the time Will scrambles to his feet. Merlin lets out a choked laugh, sprinting across the grassy bank towards the line of the trees in the distance. Will lets out a battle-cry and rushes towards his friend.

“You’re a dead man, Merlin Hunithson! Just you wait!”

The laughter of the two boys permeate the air, sending a few stray birds fluttering in fright from the tree-tops. Youth and goodwill and silly, boyish antics warm like the late spring sun.

*

Time passes.

Arthur dies.

Merlin doesn’t. Not for a long while after that.

And, even as everyone else forgets or passes away, he remembers.

**Burgess, America, 1712.**

It’s a chilly spring night. The cold is biting, and it seeps through the shivering slats of Will’s small cabin to bite at his bones. Bursts of wind rattle his window-panes and door. Will blinks, watching harsh droplets of rain spatter against the muddied glass.

Keeping vigil is always a difficult thing. More so when it’s carried out by a loved one’s sickbed. Especially when Will knows full well his daughter is living on borrowed time.

Emma, his wife, draws her shawl tighter around herself. Will remembers when he’d first given her the garment. It had been his courting gift for her, something he’d bought at the market with his very first earnings in the new world. Something she never would have bought for herself, practical woman she had been. Flowery and bright, with scalloped lace around the edge.

It’s worn now, almost falling together at the seams. Will had never thought the day would come when he would see it in such a state of worn disarray. Stained and threadbare. But the new world had hid many surprises. They had called it a land of promises, when Will and Emma had first set sail, full of dreams and hopes. Their baby girl cradled safely in their arms.

They had been proven terribly wrong.

Another wheezing cough sounds from beneath him. Will reaches down to the bed and draws a pale hand into his. Emma shifts closer from where she sits in her rocking chair. Sophie’s small hand is clammy and cold. She is too weak- Will can barely feel her squeeze to his hand.

Outiside, the wind whines. The light from their small wood-stove flickers and casts strange shadows across their walls.

It’s a dark, stormy spring night. And Will’s daughter is dying.

*

It had started out innocently enough.

A hacking cough had made it around the small settlement Will had come to call his home. Emma and he had been worried when their Sophie had caught it, but not surprised. Life in the new world wasn’t easy, and they were blessed enough not to have had any deaths in their small family yet. Rest, the village physician had said. Then she will get better.

She hadn’t.

It’s that damned hope, Will thinks. They had held on to a blind desperate hope, of the kind that says if you ignore a problem long enough then it will go away. So they had carried out their lives as normally as they could. Will went out to drive the cattle and see to the fields, Emma to gather milk and eggs and trade them at the market.

Because, they told themselves, they had to make sure there was something for Sophie to come back to once she was alright again. And she would. Of course she would. How could she not?

They shouldn’t have done that. They should have thrown everything away, and spent all their precious remaining time by Sophie’s side. Sometimes hope is more devastating than despair, Will knows now. It leaves all the more regrets.

Soon after, Sophie had taken a turn to the worse, the village’s physician deeming her unlikely to see the next month. It had changed them in different ways. Emma had turned to more faith. To stories of angels and miracles and faith-healings. It turned her into a pale mimicry of the woman she’d once been, desperate and withdrawn. Will had turned empty. Bitter, full of could-have-been’s and regrets.

Will turns his head to stop himself from seeing the large cross-shaped pendant Emma wears around her neck. _A god that refuses to answer is no friend of Will’s_.

“I’m…” Sophie wheezes, from her fevered haze. Her voice sounds different now, wet and stuffy. She can’t string a single sentence together coherently.

She used to be such a chatterbox.

“I’m alright, da,” she manages, in between breaths.

Will smiles at her, and bites his lip to stop the tears from coming. “You’ll be,” he says, and doesn’t believe the words he speaks.

“Dinner,” Emma calls from the small area they call their kitchen.

*

Dinner is a brisk, flavorless affair. Will and Emma eat half-crouched by Sophie’s bedside, because they refuse to leave their little girl on her own even for a moment. Sophie manages to open her eyes once halfway through, but falls silent after that.

They eat thin watery soup and sour bread. Before, Will and Emma would have chattered on about their everyday lives as if nothing were wrong. Emma might have talked about a particularly nasty bargain she’d gotten down at the marketplace. Will would have regaled Emma about his hand he’d hit on a rusty nail by accident.

Emma still tries to do that. She hasn’t given up on hoping, that slippery, clinging thing. It is different for the mother, Will supposes. More difficult to give up. Grief stickier and more pervasive. Still, knowing and understanding are different things, and Will refuses to let her.

“You don’t let me put in a word edgewise, Will,” Emma mutters, worn and reproachful. It’s as near a snap as his gentle wife will go. Will frowns. Silence reigns for a short while.

They eventually settle on regaling each other with stories of better times, as they always do these days. It’s an uneasy middle-ground they’ve found. A sense of closure, for Will. The faintest veneer of normalcy for Emma. And if their storytelling is a little strained, well, no-one comments about it.

Today it’s a story about the day Will first met Emma.

“I’d thought your father would’ve turned me out on your doorstep right then and there,” Will says, shaking his head in fond memory. His voice trembles as he smooths a strand of sweat-soaked hair from his daughter’s forehead. He’s speaking to Emma, but his eyes remain on Sophie. “A street rat, soaked through and through, knocking on every doorstep he could find- just to get away from the rain!”

“But my father didn’t,” Emma says. Will manages a smile despite himself.

“He didn’t,” he says. “And he changed my life.”

Will remembers those times. His father had just died, leaving him and his mother in a mountain of debt. His mother had followed his father soon after. Will had taken to the streets, but one chilly winter’s night, when the rain had proved too much for a young lad new to rough sleeping…

He’d been half out of his wits, banging on every single door he could reach. Most of the people had answered the door in their night clothes, then slammed the door in his face when they’d realized who they were dealing with. But Emma’s had been different.

Will has never forgotten how inviting that small yellow square of light had looked. And he never will, as long as he lives.

Emma’s warm, calloused hand comes to rest over his.

“Never turn a stranger away, father always said,” Emma murmurs. “You never know who might be knocking on your doorstep.”

How true those words were. Emma’s father, who had taken Will on as one of the household’s staff, would never have imagined Will would be the one to woo his precious daughter. That he would sail over the seas with her, in search of that New World everyone called the land of opportunity.

That his very own granddaughter- Emma’s and Wil’s daughter- would lie, dying, on those foreign shores.

Emma’s words ring uncomfortably of blind faith and _hoping_ and denial, and they settle uncomfortably in Will’s gut. Still, food is scarce enough that Will empties his bowl despite it all.

There’s a brief clatter as Emma clears their empty dishes away. Sophie doesn’t stir. Will doesn’t see Emma behind him, but he feels her soft heat, like a wall of warmth against his back. Her hands are very cold.

“Won’t you come to bed?” Emma asks. Will bites his lip. He won’t deny the harsh truth. Tonight may well be his daughter’s last, as might tomorrow. She won’t pass the week. At least that’s what the physician had said.

“No,” Will says. He won’t have his last memory of his daughter to be that of him having gone to sleep without her, only to wake up to her cold corpse. “Will you?”

Emma draws back, and returns with her chair to sit beside her husband. She picks up her knitting from the night before, dog-eared copy of their bible resting on the small table next to her.

Outside the storm rages. Wind howls, and rain splatters against their windowpanes.

A resounding knock sounds from the door.

*

Will almost jumps from his chair, lulled into quiet contemplation by the rhythmic thud of the rain and the flickering of the stove’s fire. The knocks are brisk, crisp, and purposeful. As if they’d come visiting with Will in particular in mind. Will pauses to think. No-one he knows of would come calling for him at this hour. Theirs is a small colony; and everyone knows enough to give the Childers family their well-deserved space.

Emma looks up at him questioningly.

“I’ll go see who it is,” Will says, and pulls on his heavy coat.

Their door has a little hole Will had drilled into it a while ago. It isn’t large enough for a bullet, not that plain wood would have much to do against one. Sophie had helped him drill it, Will remembers. She had laughed when she’d toppled out of the makeshift stool she’d been using, smudging Will’s nose with the piece of chalk she’d been using to mark the spot. Will mightn’t be able to see her laugh, anymore.

Will shakes his head and presses his eye to the hole. The night is too ripe with memories.

Outside stands a tall man in a black cloak. It’s thick and dark and shadows his face, but underneath the cowl of the hood his skin is very pale. He carries a staff of some sort that looks like a walking stick. He’s wet and soaked through, and Will can’t discern any hint of spare clothing or a pack-mule. A solitary wanderer, then.

Will doesn’t put much stock in wives’ tales, but even he has heard tell of demons come knocking in the night. Sorceres and tricksters too. The man outdoors looks a little too much like those descriptions for his liking.

Will pauses, then picks up his old rifle from where it hangs by the door. Emma tilts her head questioningly. “Trouble?” She asks. Will bites his lip.

“Maybe. A man, I’d say, a wanderer. Mayhap someone looking for a shelter for the night.”

“Is he armed, then?”

“No. Not that I think. But he’s looking too strange for my liking.”

“Never turn a stranger away,” Emma muses, quoting her late father. Her fingers smooth gently over Sophie’s brow. “Because you never know who may be knocking on the doorstep. There are tales, you remember? Of angels knocking on doors, disguised as strangers… Sophie loved those stories, she did.”

Will’s jaw clenches. Of course he remembers. Peasant farmers and poor men, rewarded for their good deeds. The stories ring thickly of miracles and magic and blind hope, all things he has long given up on.

And Will won’t give up his last moments by Sophie’s side, not even for the Lord himself.

Emma’s fingers thread into his and squeeze gently. Her eyes are the slightest bit hopeful, yes, that desperate irrational hope that seeps in despite oneself. But they’re kind, too. Emma has always been kind.

“Soaking wet, he’d be, in this weather.”

Rain rattles ominously on the windowpanes; the wind’s screech is a high-pitched whistle. Will nods grudgingly. “That he would be.”

“He might freeze to death,” Emma reasons. “Sophie wouldn’t have wanted that.”

Sophie stirs from her spot on the bed. Even with her hair plastered to her forehead with sweat, her face is sweet and caring. This is the Sophie Will remembers, who had cried over a bird with broken wings. Who had nursed a whole family of squirrels up in the rafters during winter a few years back. Never-mind that Will had nagged her ear out for it, telling her that goings were scarce enough with just the three of them.

Yes. She wouldn’t have wanted it.

“Fine,” Will mutters, forcing himself up. _Curse strangers and their importune appearances_. Again, the knocks sound, three times against the wooden door.

He pulls the door open.

*

“Ah,” the man outside says. He pushes his hood back, and his face is youthful and open under a fringe of dripping black hair. “You opened the door!”

He smiles, a wide grin that turns his eyes into half-moons and rounds his cheeks. His smile is wide and guileless, of the kind only very young children can manage. Will blinks. Not so sorcerous, then, nothing pagan or- dangerous, as the preachers had always warned him… but a little bit of an idiot.

Still, idiot or no, it’s weather a man could freeze to death in- Winter’s last vengeance before it’s forced to give way to spring. The storm is still going strong. As much as he’d hate to admit it, Emma is right. Sophie wouldn’t have wished for him to turn someone so helpless away.

Sighing, Will steps back to let the man in. “We’re willing enough to give you a shelter for the night,” Will tells him in a low voice. “We’re not bad folk, we aren’t. But…”

Will hates having to tell others about Sophie’s condition. It feels like betraying an intimate truth, somehow, and the peoples’ pity upon hearing it has never failed to turn Will’s gut. “There’s a young’un lying sick, alright? So no funny business from ‘ee.”

The man seems to consider those words for a moment. “I can’t help what I am,” he shrugs. “But I won’t harm you.”

He slips past Will without much effort, skinny as he is. The man’s eyes flit over to Sophie, lying on the far bed. The man’s entire figure seems to perk up. “Oh. You have a daughter!” He says, sounding strangely happy. Like, say, a godfather seeing his ward for the first time.

Will frowns. Does he know this man? He would have remembered, with cheekbones so ridiculous, eyes so blue… the stranger, for all his faults, isn’t of the forgettable sort. “You got married this time around?” the man continues.

“That’s none of your business,” Will snaps. _This time around_. What does _that_ mean, anyway?

“Ah.” The stranger sobers. “I’m sorry. I’d forgotten- you don’t know me yet, do you.”

_Stranger by the minute_. “I _told_ you, no funny business.” Will grabs the man’s frailer wrist in his own. “Look, if you can’t respect even the simplest of my rules-“

“Will.” Emma puts a soft hand on his arm. She turns to face the man. “I’m sorry. He isn’t usually this hair-triggered. But you must understand- we have the young’un to worry about.”

“The young one.” The man turns towards the bed where Sophie lies. For several months, she hadn’t been able to get a proper night’s sleep, fretting in her dreams and snapping awake at the slightest sound. But since a few days ago she’s slept like the dead. Even this brief commotion doesn’t seem to have woken her. The man’s eyes turn sad, a little compassionate. “She’s _really_ sick, isn’t she.”

“Doctor said she wouldn’t live past the next few days.” Emma’s eyes tear over. She puts a hand on the stranger’s. Will recognizes the faint glint in her eyes. Hope. And not the nice, hardy sort; but the heady, desperate sort, that leads grieving mothers to witch-doctors and such. He bites his lip.

“Pray for her, with us?” Emma asks. The man inclines his head. The slant of his mouth has turned a lot more serious now.

“I don’t really do praying,” he says. “These new gods, they don’t seem to listen to me anyhow. But I can sit with you. For whatever I’m worth.” He sneaks a sideways glance towards Will. Almost as if searching for a sign of recognition, or approval. Will gives him neither, even though it sends a strange pang through his heart.

There’s something achingly familiar about the way the man shakes his head and then lowers it, light dancing over sharp cheekbones. In that dejected slant of his neck.

Will sits, forcing his eyes shut, as Emma calls upon God almighty to spare their child.

“Few days,” she sobs, clenching her fists to stop the tears. The stranger’s head rises, a strangely resolute glint to his eyes.

“Or not.” He pauses. “You know what they say about strangers on your doorstep.”

*

Emma falls asleep by Sophie’s bed shortly after, and it’s only Will and the man in the quiet of the house. Emma is sprawled across Sophie’s prone body, the girl’s pale fingers clenched tightly in her larger, more calloused ones. Her knitting needles lie abandoned in the other hand.

Will doesn’t begrudge her. He knows Emma would have hated falling asleep more than anyone else, and Emma has spent the last three nights or so wide awake, tending to Sophie, clasping her hands together in prayer when she thought no-one was looking.

But something about the stranger seems to have set her at ease, perhaps even unconsciously. Will slides a sideways glance to the man. There’s _something_ , Will can admit that much. A feeling of goodwill and safety, of vague familiarity, that goes above and beyond the clean-cut kindness of his face.

Still, his arrival seems to have rekindled that damned hope in Emma, and Will cannot help but begrudge the visitor for that. So their shared silence is an uncomfortable one. Will is a slitherer-outer at heart, as Emma would have put it- he’d much rather run away to someplace else than be forced to share a space with someone he’s uncomfortable with. But their house is a simple one, built painstakingly through Will and Emma’s effort. One room serves as a dining room, a living room, and their bedroom. There’s no-where for Will to go.

Will had planned to add another wing to the house, he remembers. A neighbor had decided to move back to the mainland, and a plot of land next to theirs had been freed. Then Sophie had fallen sick, and he had never gotten around to it.

“You still have that habit,” a low, lilting voice sounds from beside him. The stranger’s voice has a strange accent, as if English isn’t his native tongue. It snaps Will out of his wandering thoughts.

“Pardon?” Will frowns. He’s on edge already, _every second away from Sophie’s side is a second wasted-_ And the stranger’s oddly knowing tone isn’t helping one bit.

“Tapping your feet on the floor. When you’re anxious.” The stranger tilts his head, looking at Will with eyes that are both sad and fond. “You’re anxious, now, aren’t you? As you’ve been for a long while now. How long has it been since you’ve gone out, treated yourself to something nice?”

“That’s none of your business,” Will snaps, for the second time that night. _Nosy git_. The man hums.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But, Will,” Will starts at the use of his name. _Had_ he told the stranger that? “No matter what happens, you have a life of your own too. You need to remember that.”

Blinding rage fills Will. How dare this man march into their house, take advantage of their hospitality- then treat Sophie’s ills as nothing? Before he knows it, the stranger’s shirt is clenched in Will’s straining fingers. He grits his teeth.

It’s strange, this feeling. Because it feels as if he were betrayed by someone close, instead of a complete stranger. Will has always been hotheaded, but it doesn’t stretch to compete non-acquaintances. Were it anyone else, Will would have shrugged it off, and sent whoever it was away with a sound piece of Will’s mind.

But it’s different, now. Blood flows hot through Will’s veins.

“One more word and it’s the outdoors for you,” he growls.

The stranger is unfazed, blue eyes deep and knowing. He smiles a little and shakes his head, sadly. “It’s alright. I’ve done what I’ve come to do- see how you were doing. And, well, it seems like I’m forever moving on. But.” He brushes deceptively cool fingers against Will’s, and Will lowers him back to the floor. The stranger’s deft fingers dance over his own shirt, rearranging the wrinkles from where Will had gripped it. “Will you let me do something for you? As one last favor?”

Will bites his lip. Something tells him the stranger won’t do anything malicious. But he can’t take any risks either.

He eyes the distance to his rifle. “Fine,” he says. “But be quick about it. An’ no funny business.”

The stranger simply nods, and moves over towards Sophie’s side. Will trails after him like a nervous shadow.

The stranger sends him a vaguely hurt look. “I wouldn’t hurt anyone so dear to you,” he says.

Will believes him.

There’s a solemnness to the way the man kneels before Sophie’s bedside, one hand to her head, another to her chest. It’s almost like how the priests pray for their patients, except it’s different too. Will has never seen a priest take such a strange position whilst praying.

It looks pagan, almost. But it’s quiet and serene as well, as if the world itself is holding its breath alongside the suddenly frozen flames of the fireplace. The stranger closes his eyes, and mutters an unintelligible string of words. Something golden flashes under his closed lids.

Will stands in surprise. The stranger follows Will up. He looks a little more tired, but there’s a satisfied glint in his eyes. Genuinely happy, as if he’s just done something worthwhile, whatever it was.

“It’s done,” he says. “I’ll be on my way now. But- remember something for me?”

“What _is_ it?” Will asks, confused and a little impatient. The following silence feels like an eternity. The man smiles, a crooked, lax thing. It transforms his entire countenance, making him look carefree and young and a little nostalgic, even with the dripping black cloak he picks back up from the mantelpiece.

His eyes are very serious.

“Don’t be an idiot,” the man says, and grins. He strides forward and slides open the room. Outside, wind whistles and rain pounds against the ground. Will stands frozen for a moment before he rushes towards the door, a strange urgency consuming him. He _knows_ that smile.

But, by the time Will arrives, the man is nowhere to be seen. Something pale and small glints at Will from the floor. Will stoops and picks it up.

A small wooden carving of a bird- a Merlin.

*

Sophie is stirring by the time he gets back. Will rushes over to her side. “Sophie? Is there anything wrong?”

“No, da,” she mutters. Will’s breath catches in his throat. She’s rubbing her eyes with one small hand, frowning a little as if she’s waking up from a headache. There’s a healthy flush high on her cheeks, and Will hasn’t heard that particular, petulant tone in nearly a year.

“Say that again,” he says, squeezing her hand so hard that it must hurt. Sophie narrows her eyes.

“What’s up? Da, I swear, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

_It’s gone_ , Will thinks. Since Sophie had come down with her illness, there had always been a hint of congestion in her voice. Something that clogged her throat and turned her syllables nasally and whining. But he can’t hear it anymore.

“You’re crying, da,” Sophie says, sounding a little worried. Will raises a hand to his face. Yes, he is.

Will has always been a practical man. He doesn’t put much stock in old stories, in legends. But what he has just seen, it’s a _miracle_ …

“It’s okay,” he whispers. “It’s okay, Soph. It’s happy tears.”

Sophie looks at him as if he’s being silly. And he is. But oh, how glad he is that he can be.

Will almost trips over his own feet in his hurry to wake Emma. It’s all going to be alright. It’s all going to be alright, and he isn’t going to waste this second chance he’s gotten for his _life._

*

Somewhere, a lone wanderer smiles.

**_The End_**.


End file.
